Chapter II (3)

In 1834 Peat took an oath of office as “Prior of the Sixth Language of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in London,” swearing “to keep and obey the ancient statutes of the said Sovereign Order,” and “to govern the said Sixth Language as Prior thereof under the provision of the statute of the 4th and 5th of Philip and Mary in the case made and provided.” By the statutes of the Order (which he promised to keep and obey) he was neither qualified for appointment nor appointed by the proper authority, and there could not be a Prior of a Language--the Languages were governed by Bailiffs, with Priors as their subordinates in the various priories. There is no statute of 4 & 5 Philip & Mary relating to the Order, only Letters Patent; and these make no provision for the government of the Language or the Priory. So he only bound himself to discharge the duties of an impossible office under an imaginary statute.

These people could not even make out mediæval Latin. If a candidate for admission proved his ancestry, he was admitted a knight by right, _de justitia_. If he could not prove his ancestry, he might be admitted a knight by favour, _de gratia_. Out of this they have made Knights of Justice and Knights of Grace. The _hospitale_ at Jerusalem was a place of hospitality where pilgrims were entertained. They mistook it for a hospital, and then went in for ambulance-work, first-aid, etc., on the strength of their mistake. No doubt, they have done much useful work, especially in this War. But you can very well do useful work without pretending to be something that you aren’t. And these non-combatants are posing as successors of the greatest clan of warriors in the age of Chivalry.

They were silly enough to apply for a Charter of Incorporation, and this brought them up against some lawyers with no love for false pretences. Instead of getting a charter as a branch of the real Order, or in some way connected with it, they only got a charter (14 May 1888) as a charitable society of fifty years’ standing.

Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but I doubt its covering lies as well; and their lies were multitudinous. They had a statement printed--“The English, or Sixth, Language of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem: a brief sketch of its history and present position, compiled by a committee appointed for that purpose by the Chapter of the Language.” It can hardly be surpassed in puerility. It talks of proceedings at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and at Paris in 1816, as if there were no such things as the _Acten des Wiener Congresses_ and the _Archives Parlementaires_ to show that its statements are untrue in all essential points. It cites the Letters Patent of 2 May 1557 as saying one thing, when they say another, as anyone can see by looking at Dugdale’s _Monasticon_, where the document is printed. (I had Dugdale collated with the Patent Roll, and there is no mistake.) It says Peat’s oath of office was sworn in the King’s Bench, 24 February 1834, and is on the record. It would certainly be on the record, if it was sworn in the King’s Bench, as 9 George IV, cap. 17, was then in force. I had the record searched: it was not there.

Not long after I was called to the Bar, an old Queen’s Counsel said to me as we were coming out of court--“I can’t understand that fellow telling those transparent lies. The whole object of telling a lie is to deceive. If you don’t do that, you don’t attain your object, and you have the bad taste in your mouth the same.”

When the Knights left Malta in 1798, they took their greatest relic with them--the right hand of their patron saint, John Baptist. Having chosen the Czar Paul as Grand Master, they delivered this relic to him at Gatchina on 12 October 1799; and it has remained in Russia ever since. The anniversary is kept, and there is a service for the Translation of the Right Hand in imitation of the old service at Constantinople on the anniversary of its translation there from Antioch. It goes from Petersburg to Gatchina on 11 October and is carried to Saint Paul’s church there on 12 October, returning to Petersburg on 22 October. I saw it in the Winter Palace at Petersburg in 1889, and made some notes about it then--“The Right Hand is sadly dilapidated. The fourth and fifth fingers are gone, so that it can no longer gesticulate in response to inquiries about the harvest. There is a very large hole in the thumb, far too large for the little morsel of the thumb that choked the man-eating dragon at Antioch. And it is all very black indeed. The remaining fingers are long and slender, and the nails are delicately formed. It is the hand of an Egyptian, and a mummy.” It was at Constantinople when Sultan Mohammed took the city in 1453, and Sultan Bajazet gave it to the Knights in 1484.

Rhodes was besieged by Sultan Solyman in 1522, and at the great assault upon the city, 24 September, the garrison believed they saw John Baptist himself standing on the roof of his own church, waving a banner and encouraging them. It really was the prior’s French cook; and when they found this out, they accused him of making signals to the enemy, and nearly murdered him.

At the siege of Rhodes by Mithridates in 88 B.C. the garrison saw the goddess Isis standing on her temple and hurling down a mass of flame on the attacking force. And such apparitions have been common, from Castor and Pollux at Lake Regillus down to Saint George at Mons. Saint George, however, had no business there. He suffered martyrdom at Diospolis, twelve miles from Jaffa, where Perseus delivered Andromeda; and the old legend was transferred to him. It must have been a whale that Perseus killed, according to Pliny’s description of the bones; and, if Saint George had known his business, he would have abandoned Mons and gone out spearing submarines.

There is a treatise by Artemidoros on the interpretation of dreams, _Oneirocritica_, which (I believe) is not much read now, yet really is worth reading, as it shows what people used to dream about in the second century A.D. We do not dream now of being beheaded or crucified or becoming gladiators or fighting with wild beasts or being sold as slaves. But apparently these people dreamt oftener of such calamities than of the minor ills of life. Judging by what they dreamt, I should say their minds were not so complex as our own.

In interpreting their dreams Artemidoros tried induction, noting down the things they dreamt and what happened to them afterwards. Thus (iv. 31) Stratonicos dreamt he kicked the Roman Emperor: on going out he trod on something, and found it was a gold coin with the Emperor’s image on it. There were two kinds of dreams. If people dreamt of doing anything that they did habitually, it was nothing but a dream and needed no interpreting; but it became a vision, if they dreamt of doing things they seldom did, or could not do. Thus, it was only a dream, when they dreamt of lighting a lamp from the fire on the hearth; but it was a vision, when they dreamt they lit it from the Moon--after dreaming this a man went blind, v. 11, 34. Most people would be content with saying that the thing could not be done, because the Moon was too far off; but Artemidoros goes on to explain that nothing can be lighted from the Moon, as the Moon itself is not alight and shines only by reflexion.

They often dreamt odd things. Thus (i. 4) somebody dreamt he saw a man playing draughts with Charon, and he helped him to win the game: Charon did not like losing it, and went for him: he bolted off, with Charon after him, and got as far as an inn called the Camel; and he slipped into a shed there and closed the door, and thus dodged Charon, who ran past.--It is an uncomfortable sort of dream that might occur to anybody now, only the setting would not be the same. Instead of Charon, it would be the Devil; and instead of draughts, it would very likely be King Arthur and the Devil playing quoits. They played a game of quoits with Haytor Rocks about three miles from here--the Devil missed King Arthur with one rock, and then King Arthur got the Devil with the other, and sent him down below.

In dreams I have imagined myself in Rhodes, walking up the hill at Ialysos and finding Laon cathedral on the top. Laon stands on the same sort of hill: so this came from mixed memories. I have also imagined myself in Paris, driving to the Opéra and finding Milan cathedral there instead. They are both great staring buildings of about three acres each on similar sites: so this came from mixed memories also. But then I found the Louvre and Tuileries turned right round, with the east front of the Louvre looking westward down the Tuileries gardens; and I cannot think what mental twist did that. When I dream of being in those gardens, I usually see the west front of the Tuileries as it was before the war of 1870, not the ruin afterwards nor the vacant space there now.

I dream almost every night that I am travelling, sometimes on a ship but usually by train. In former years I travelled a good deal, and could ascribe the dreams to that; but since 1914 I have not travelled at all, and yet I dream of travelling just the same. As a rule, some little thing goes wrong--a few mornings ago I woke up very cross at finding that the Penzance dining-car did not go through to Brindisi, whereas the time-bill said it did. And these things usually happen at a station that could not possibly exist, being partly a big terminus and partly a junction and partly a wayside station with one signal-post. I can see a great deal of this station with my mind’s eye when I am awake, only there are misty bits just where the wayside station merges in the junction and where the junction merges in the terminus. But I do not see these misty bits in dreams, as my mind is occupied with one thing at a time and jumps from thing to thing like pictures on a film. This station has remained unaltered in my mind for twenty years at least, as I remember talking of it to a man who died in 1899.

As a rule, I see things with my mind’s eye almost as distinctly as if I were looking at the things themselves; and I thought that everyone could do the same till I read Galton’s _Inquiries into Human Faculty_ and found how greatly people varied as to this. I also see some things with my mind’s eye as symbols for other things that cannot be seen at all, e.g. boot-trees for arguments. They are trees for shoes, without handles, and made of polished wood; and they are on a grey felt floor with an open doorway at the further end. When two arguments lead up to a third, the corresponding boot-trees turn their toes in towards the other’s heel; and I have seen as many as eight or ten boot-trees pointing like this to half the number in a line beyond them, these also pointing to others further on, and finally a boot-tree going through the doorway. I find it very convenient--I see more at a single glance than I could put into a page of print.

Galton speaks of numbers being personified, and gives several instances of children doing this. The son of an old friend of mine--an undergraduate now--tells me he did it when a child and sometimes does it still. His views are--“1 and 0 do not count, being inactive. 2, good-natured, always doing its best to please. 3, sometimes kind and condescending, hated by 8 when added, but not when multiplied to make 24: great friend of 9. 4, not very noticeable, but means well: great friend of 8 and 6. 5, much the same as 4, but no special friend except 2: rather meek. 6, inclined to be selfish: no great friend of 3, pals with 4 and 8. 7, unlucky and despised, bad luck in making such numbers as 49 and 63 when multiplied. 8, fat and good-natured, but inclined to be selfish: likes being made up to good round numbers such as 12, 24, 48, &c. 9, friend of 3, disagreeable and a bully, despised for making brutish numbers such as 27, 63, 81, &c.”

I now suspect Pythagoras of having done this as a child and then, instead of putting away childish things, making it a basis for much of his philosophy. Thus, amongst other things, he says that 8 is Justice itself, being _isacis isos_ or _bis bina bis_--in other words, it is composed of 4 and 4, and each 4 is composed of 2 and 2, so that there is even balance throughout. This reasoning must surely be an afterthought to justify some childish fancy.

Usually, when people think of numbers, they see the Arabic figures with their mind’s eye; and some people can see these figures manœuvring at each stage of a calculation. (I heard this from George Bidder, who was famous as The Calculating Boy a hundred years ago.) Within narrow limits I see this manœuvring myself; but, although they are mere figures, I feel that they are moving like soldiers on parade. And that comes very near personifying them.

I imagine that the people who see things very clearly with their mind’s eye, are the most likely people to see visions when their intellect has lost its balance through hunger or fatigue. In dreams the outward eye is closed, and the mind’s eye must rely on memories that are often mixed. But in visions both sights are at work, though the outward eye is working listlessly for want of physical strength; and I suspect that every vision is based on what the outward eye is seeing at the time.

There is a clump of trees upon the summit of a hill about three miles from here, and it stands out against the sky-line, when one looks up along the valley of the Wrey. It looked like any ordinary clump of trees until the undergrowth was cut a little while ago; but now one sees the sky between the tree-tops and the hill, and the line of tree-tops looks just like a prehistoric monster of the lizard type. I notice that it looks more life-like, when I am tired out; and with want of sleep and food as well, I might have visions of a dragon there.

Some years ago a woman said that she had seen the Devil, when she had only seen the Rural Dean. She lived in a lonely cottage; and, when the Devil went to Widdicombe on 21 October 1638, he called there to inquire the way, and he asked for water--which betrayed him by going off in steam. Now the Rural Dean was dressed in black and mounted on a big black horse; and it was a foggy day, so that he loomed up large. Not knowing the story, he called there to inquire the way to Widdicombe, and asked for water also, but did not get it, as the woman fled. I think she had a vision, merely based on what she saw, and going far beyond that. She said she saw his horns.

People who have seen the Devil, all say he is just like the pictures of him: so I suppose they carry these pictures in their mind, and see them with the mind’s eye, when they are in a fright. Pictures may also be the basis of many of our outlandish dreams. After a long look at a picture of some centaurs, a man here said to me--“Pity there bain’t such critters now: they’d be proper vitty on a farm.” I quite agreed with him, they would. A week afterwards he said to me--“I dreamed as I were one o’ they, and, my word, I did slap in.”

I have not heard of the Devil being seen about here very lately, nor of many witches. Seven or eight years ago two elderly people were complaining that someone had ill-wished them; but their misfortunes could be explained by their own want of foresight, without the intervention of an evil eye. They came from Cornwall. An old friend of mine tells me that his grandmother practised witch-craft there. She could bring down rain or bring in shoals of fish, but would seldom perform the rites until she had been asked repeatedly. In fact, she waited till the weather showed her what was coming.

My grandfather was called an atheist by several people here, because he scoffed at witch-craft, “a thing attested by the Word of God.” If you denied the Witch of Endor, you might as well deny John Baptist or Saint Paul. Witch-craft was as well attested as the miracles. But then they said that miracles had ceased, yet said the Bible showed that there was witch-craft still.

In very early life I felt certain that a woman here must be a witch, because she looked it. She lived in a cottage that had a great big open fireplace, and she sat there cowering over the fire on the hearth, with her walking-stick leant up across her knees. I had no doubts about her flying up the chimney on that stick, and always hoped she would while I was there.

We have substitutes for most things now, even substitutes for witches. My father noted in his diary on 7 April 1844, “Witch-craft a common belief to this day in Lustleigh, and prevalent even among the better-informed classes.” And now I note that alien-espionage has been just as common a belief from 1914 onwards, and especially among those classes. They scent spies and aliens as keenly as the old folk scented witches; but the mania is more expensive now.--Two young men had bought a lonely cottage in a wood, and were living their own life up there. Until the War nobody ever suggested that they were anything but English. Then people said that they were German, and would as readily have said that they were Japanese or Russian, if we had been at war with Russia or Japan. And then a more inventive person said they had a gun-platform of concrete underneath their lawn. In a careless moment the editor of a local paper put that in. It was a costly blunder, and the lawyers profited.

There are people everywhere just now with such a comprehensive hate of Germany that they tell us to abjure all German things for evermore; but I notice that the men who talk like this, are almost always wearing German hats. Instead of saying that the hat is Tyrolese or Homburg or whatever German type it really is, they say it is of English make and call it Trilby or some other name like that. Yet these same men are always preaching that a German is a German always, although he has been naturalized or born here and has assumed an English name.

In speaking of the politicians who governed France in 1871, Bismarck said that some of them had Jewish names but several more had Jewish noses. People here think only of the alien name, forgetting that the alien blood is just as active in descendants in the female line, though the name has lapsed on marriage. There is the progeny of a Dutchman who settled at Exeter in the reign of William the Third. Nobody bothered about the female line; but descendants in male line were hunted out as Germans by a pack of people who knew too little of language or of history to recognize the name as Dutch.

There is probably more alien blood in England than these people think. They say that so-and-so is tainted by having an alien ancestor some generations back. But in nine cases out of ten they cannot give a complete list of their own great-great-grandparents, or even their great-grandparents; and the completest lists may not be quite conclusive. There was a wonderful old lady on a Dartmoor farm, ostensibly of English ancestry, but born about the time when French prisoners-of-war were out on parole there. I have seen her towering form, with eagle eye and outstretched hand, directing geese into their pond; and I have fancied that I saw a Marshal in Napoleon’s army launching a charge of cuirassiers.

I have heard her say Bo to a goose. Few people say it now, and they never say it properly. If it is said in the right way, the goose turns round and waddles off at once, however much it may have hissed before. It is like Ahi with a horse in Italy. When the driver has flogged and progged in vain, as a last resort he says Ahi, and then the brute moves on.

In my early days my grandfather would often talk of the French prisoners-of-war whom he remembered here a century ago; and I never imagined then that I was going to have prisoners-of-war working for me here, and that these prisoners would be German. They were quartered at Newton Abbot in the workhouse, and came out each day to work, returning for the night. I had nineteen here in the summer of 1918, though never more than six at once. There were six from Bavaria, three from Baden, two from Wurtemberg and one from Saxony; and seven were reckoned as Prussians, but two of these were from the Rhineland, two from Hannover, two from Hamburg and the other one from Silesia. They were the same kind of people that I have always met in rural parts of Germany--good-tempered and good-natured countryfolk, exceedingly unlike the Huns depicted by our Propaganda.

However little we may like it, the Germans are our own kith and kin. Sixteen of those nineteen prisoners would certainly have passed as English, if they had been in English clothes and had not cut their hair so short. A person here confounded Hannover with Andover, and thought the Hannoverians were of English birth. Of course, language makes a gulf; and here it was not merely a matter of English and German. The prisoners spoke such different dialects that they could hardly understand each other, and the Yorkshire of the corporal in charge of them was not exactly like our Devonshire here.

Quite early in the War the people here discovered that all Belgians were not angels, and I think they are discovering that all Germans are not devils. But at first the prisoners were not welcome. Looking at them from the road, a man declared he would not stand in the same field with them. A girl who heard him, looked at him, and was unkind enough to say, “No, not in the same battle-field.”

Standing in the wheat field, I was watching two good-looking cheery youths at work there. They were the same sort and evidently liked each other; but one belonged to Lustleigh and the other one to Dueren near Cologne. I felt some doubts about the state of things that had put them into hostile armies, to maim or kill each other if they could.

On an outlying farm the clock went wrong, and struck one at three and two at four and so on. This was a nuisance, as people were unable to remember which was wrong, the striking or the hands. But the farmer settled it by keeping the clock an hour fast; and then, when it pointed to one and struck eleven, everybody knew that it was twelve.

There is much the same confusion now on every farm that has adopted Summer Time. Farm work must be regulated by the sun--some things cannot be done until the dew is off the ground, others cannot be done until the noon-tide heat has passed, and so on with other things all through the day; and the times for doing them have been fixed accordingly. It would be disastrous to do the things an hour earlier: so the times for doing them are all moved on. The clock says five instead of four, but what was timed for five is timed for six.

For many years past the Board of Agriculture has called for a return on 4 June in every year with the acreage of the crops and the quantity of live-stock on each farm, including horses but not including asses. In 1920 the War Office called for a return of horses and asses on 4 June. So (I suppose) asses must be useless in agriculture, but of some use in war. Just at that time the War Office was suspected of planning an expedition into southern Russia; and I wondered if a man of genius had been reading in Herodotos how a Persian army made an expedition there, and frightened the enemy clean away by the braying of the asses in its train.

Although the War Office and the Board of Agriculture were calling for returns on the same day, 4 June, the War Office did not apply for them direct, or through the Board of Agriculture, but through the Board of Trade. And these authorities differed over mules. The War Office had asked for a return of horses and asses, and said that ‘horse’ included ‘mule’; but the Board of Trade changed this into a return of horses, mules and asses. Seeing that the Board of Trade was acting under an Army Council Regulation made under section 114 of the Army Act, I doubted its having any right whatever to distinguish horse and mule.

In this part of Devon we all received a notice in the autumn of 1917, headed “Increased Food Production for 1918,” and informing us--“The area of corn and potatoes allotted to the Southern Division of Devon for 1918 is 86,000 acres. In order to get this quantity it is necessary for all farms to have 30 per cent. of their total acreage into corn and potatoes. This percentage has been adopted by the Executive Committee for the Division, who have power to enforce it. You are expected to have [number inserted] acres into corn and potatoes in 1918.” I suppose the fools imagined that an average of 30 per cent. on all the farms together was the same thing as 30 per cent. on every single farm. But they had the power, and they used it with disastrous results. They ploughed their 30 per cent. on dairy farms, destroying pasture that will not mature again for years; and on other farms with 60 per cent. quite fit for ploughing, they ploughed no more than 30. On some moorland farms they only got their 30 by ploughing such sterile ground that the crop was of less value than the seed that was put in.

There was a story of a successful advocate who was troubled on his death-bed by the thought of having got innocent men convicted, but at last found comfort in the thought of having also got guilty men acquitted, so that, upon the whole, he had got justice done. And this Committee will perhaps find comfort in the thought of having got the specified amount of ploughing done.

In some flat parts of England people might believe that all land was alike and one acre as good as another; but I cannot understand how anyone could think so here, in a district that runs up from sea-level to about 2000 feet above, with all sorts of soils and climates. The fools may say they had no time to make a survey of each farm; but that is no excuse. They had the figures at hand, and did not use them.

Under the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 a map was made of every parish in England, and every field was numbered on the map; and the corresponding number on the Tithe Apportionment gave the acreage of the field and its state of cultivation. It is waste of seed and labour to put corn or potatoes into fields that were not arable then, for they were grown wherever it was possible to grow them, as they were paying crops--Potato Disease did not appear till 1845, and the Corn Laws were not repealed till 1846. The fools could easily have seen what fields were arable then, and based their regulations upon that. They had the figures in every parish, at Exeter for the whole of Devon, and in London for the whole of England, for the apportionments and maps were made in triplicate--one for the parson of the parish, one for the bishop of the diocese, and one for the Tithe Commissioners themselves, which last is at the office of the Board of Agriculture.

In the autumn of 1918 we had a notice that 35 per cent. of every holding must be ploughed, and “substitution of quota (from one holding to another) will not be allowed under any circumstances.” Suppose arrangements had been made for ploughing an acre of productive land on one holding instead of an acre of unproductive land upon another. It was forbidden by these fools, in the name of Food Production.

Farmers often blundered, and have been ridiculed for that; but after all they only blundered here and there and now and then. As things are, they have to blunder on a bigger scale, and may be prosecuted if they fail to blunder as prescribed.

As for the people who prescribe these blunders, it is charitable to think that they are merely fools: they may be something worse. The law assumes that everyone intends the natural consequences of his acts, and might very well assume that they intended doing all they could to damage agriculture, without increasing the supply of food. Such things have been done before. Thus, the London County Council wanted an excuse for running steamers on the Thames, and therefore made it impossible for the steamboat companies to carry on. It then ran steamers at a loss, using money from the rates, and finally came to grief with them.

These public bodies come to grief in the most foolish ways. I am one of the trustees of a property in London, and the County Council scheduled part of it for “betterment.” We could not comprehend how houses in one street would be bettered by the Council’s widening another street that ran parallel with it some hundred yards away. But the Council then decided on making a new street at right angles to the street that it had widened, and demolished these houses to make way for the new street. It wanted now to buy them at their market value, but we made it buy them at their “bettered” value--we could not, as trustees, sell property to the Council for less than the Council’s own valuation of it. So the Council paid us (with the ratepayers’ money) for a “betterment” that never existed except in some cranks’ brains.

Lawyers abbreviate trustees into trēēs, and a careless copyist will sometimes write trustees for trees, if the crossing of the _t_ is rather long. On looking into a deed, I found a power to cut down and sell trustees by public auction or by private treaty, etc., etc., and I was one of the trustees there. In another trust there were two sums of Consols in the joint names of myself and co-trustee. They were entered in the usual way as A and B accounts, and it happened that our B account went on long after our A account was closed. My co-trustee was a knight, belonging to various orders, and ‘B act.’ came next the groups of letters following his name. After a time this was altered into ‘Bart.’--an excusable mistake, as there was no ‘A act.’ and he was ‘Sir.’ Having thus become a baronet here, he was entered as ‘Bart.’ in other stocks standing in his name.

A friend of mine was being shown into a stockbroker’s room just as a shabby old man was coming out; and the old man turned back and said something which showed that he was speculating heavily. My friend remonstrated with the stockbroker for letting the man risk money that he manifestly could not afford to lose. But the answer was--“Don’t make yourself uneasy over him. He’s very fond of speculating, but he always keeps a hundred thousand in Consols, so that he may never be reduced to actual want.”

I doubt if many people understand the happiness of misers. It must be like the happiness of feeling thoroughly fit. There is a joy in knowing you can jump clean over any gate you see; and I think the miser has this joy in knowing he can pay for anything he likes. But he does not go buying things, any more than you go jumping over gates.

The air is often very buoyant here, especially upon the hill tops; and one morning on the top of Easton Down a friend of mine turned round to me and said--“Well, you know, I don’t think the Ascension was very much of a miracle after all.” And certainly one felt there was no saying where one wouldn’t go to, if one just gave a jump.

A man here said to me, “Her went up ’xactly like an angel,” as if he often saw them go, and thought I must have seen them too. (He was speaking of the finish of a play he saw in town.) Another person here was very certain of what angels did or did not do. A stranger came to the back-door one Sunday morning, and asked for a drink of cider to help him on his way. He was denied it by the maid who was in charge there, and thereupon he said to her--“You know not what you do. You might be entertaining angels unawares.” To which she answered--“Get thee’ long. Angels don’t go drinkin’ cider church-times.”

People sometimes ask me for advice on matters of which I am no judge, and a girl once asked me this:--She had been engaged to a young man for several years, but the engagement had just been broken off. She used to suffer dreadfully from toothache; and in the early days of his affection he sent her to the dentist, and paid for putting in a plate of teeth. Was that plate of teeth a present that ought to be returned? Rightly or wrongly, I said that it was not; and I see she has it still.

When teeth are drawn, young people here think nothing of the pain, but often speak with pride of the resistance of their teeth--“he scarce could stir’n,” or “he had a proper job to get’n.” In a letter to my father, 20 January 1860, my grandfather says--“I saw a man spitting out blood, and asked him the matter, when he said he had had a tooth drawn, and the doctor had torn the jaw.... I gave him brandy on lint, which soon stopped the flow of blood.... The old dentists or tooth-drawers used to apply salt and water, which was not bad, though a little brandy would have been better: but the fact is their charge was only sixpence, so they could not afford the brandy. But now, I hear, those new fashioned ones charge as much as five shillings: therefore there is no excuse.”

A man here who was born in 1852, tells me that he had whooping-cough when he was four years old, and that he was treated for it (if not cured of it) by being laid on a sheep’s forme. A forme is the imprint that a sheep makes on the grass by lying in one place all night; and when the sheep gets up in the morning, a sort of vapour rises from the warm ground underneath into the cold morning air. He was taken out into a meadow in the early morning, and was told to lie face-downwards on a forme and breathe this vapour in, not merely through the nostrils but with open mouth. He breathed it in until the ground was cold and there was no more vapour to be breathed (a matter of about five minutes) and then he was taken home to bed.

People now-a-days laugh at cures like that, but they laughed at Jenner when he first said that there was something about a cow that kept small-pox away. There may be something about a sheep that cures the whooping-cough; but there may be people who would rather have the whooping-cough than cure it in this way. I remember about fifty years ago a claret was being advertised as an antidote to gout; and the old three-bottle men who tried it, all said that they would rather have the gout.

I started drinking port when I was less than two years old. An injudicious friend remonstrated with my mother--if I had port when I was well, what could I take if I were ill and needed strengthening? She answered that it would prevent my ever being ill. I never was ill enough to spend a day in bed till I was fifty-five, and might never have been ill at all, if I had gone on drinking port proportionately; but I degenerated with the times and only drank two glasses, not two bottles, as I should. There is an entry in Dyott’s Diary, 10 November 1787--“There were just twenty dined, and we drank sixty-three bottles of wine.” I heard of a man going to a physician because he could not drink three bottles, as his father did before him. The physician said, “Perhaps it _was_ port that your father drank.” Even in my time it has become a different wine. If I can trust my tongue, the vintages of 1900 and 1904 are quite unlike the vintages of 1847 and 1858 at similar ages. Phylloxera attacked the Douro vineyards after 1878, and most of them have been replanted with a stronger sort of vine.

My grandfather was a little disturbed about my starting port so early in my life. He writes to my father on 22 November 1858, “My views are different from yours respecting the treatment of young children: however, I hope all will go right with him,” and again on 30 January 1859, “I hope he gets on well--but not too much port wine, mind.” All went right with me, and I got on as he hoped; and he writes on 25 December 1859 that a neighbour said I had “limbs strong enough for a wrestler.”

Wrestling was formerly as great a sport in Devon as in Cornwall; but it died out in this district about fifty years ago. My brother writes to my father, 2 August 1866--“I went to see the wrestling, but it was a rough and clumsy business.” This was at a festival at Lustleigh in honour of the opening of the railway. My grandfather writes to my father, 28 May 1858--“There was a grand wrestling match at Moreton on Saturday, set on foot by Mr *****, who said he would see one match more before he left the world.” A few years earlier there was wrestling at Moreton every summer. My grandfather notes, 22 June 1841, “Moreton Wrestling today,” 14 June 1842, “Wrestling at Moreton today and tomorrow,” and so on, and usually with a further note that so-and-so or so-and-so had gone off there instead of sticking to work.

Writing to my father on 10 November 1861, my grandfather says, “Football was a game much played in my youth, but cricket was my favourite game.” He was born in 1789; and the cricket and football of a century ago were very different from cricket and football now.

The chimney-pot hat used to be worn in playing cricket; and I have seen it worn in matches on village-greens and even at Lord’s. The distinction between Gentlemen and Players was much sharper then than now; and the Gentlemen wore chimney-pots, while the Players wore caps. Policemen also wore chimney-pots, a London fashion adopted in Milan and retained by policemen there. And the Channel Pilots wore chimney-pots. I remember them on liners starting from the Thames. The pilots were dropped off Dover or the Isle of Wight, and kept their hats on even when going down the ship’s side to the pilot cutter, and came on board in the same style on voyages home.

My father told me how he once got a lesson in the Continental way of taking off your hat to anyone. He met Louis Philippe strolling in the Tuileries gardens, and raised his hat to him as he would have raised it to Prince Albert or anyone like that in England. And in reply the King not merely raised his hat, but swung it right down to the level of his knees and up again.

He notes in his diary on 17 September 1840 that he was at Versailles that afternoon, and “there were no cheers or any sign of respect” when Louis Philippe drove out from the Trianon. He also notes on 15 September that “the Palais de Justice is strongly guarded, as young Bonaparte is imprisoned there.” Some years afterwards he saw ‘young Bonaparte’ in the Tuileries gardens and Louis Philippe at Kew.--Napoleon the Third had landed in France on 6 August 1840, and was sentenced on 6 October to imprisonment for life, not escaping until 1846.

After a visit to the Palais de Justice, 16 October 1839, he notes down in his diary--“An advocate on the right bench was addressing the judges as I entered. He used an immense deal of action and gesture, quite unknown at the English bar. Then the advocate on the other side replied. His action was much more violent, even when reading from documents.” He liked things quietly done. In his diary, 24 March 1838, he speaks of Lord Denman as “a judge more to my liking than any one I ever saw: quite a contrast to some of them, especially in his exclusive attention to the case in hand, instead of officiously meddling with every thing and body in the court.”

Some twenty years ago a very astute old man in Paris got into litigation in the English courts about a group of companies that he controlled; and he asked me confidentially how much I thought he ought to give the judge in order to secure the right decision. I felt it would be waste of time to tell him that we did not do this here: so I told him what huge salaries our judges got, and what big fortunes most of them had made while they were at the Bar. He saw their price would be prohibitive, and gave the notion up. He really had a very strong case that was bound to win upon its merits; but from what he said, I gathered that merits were not always the decisive point in France in litigation or in anything else.

I once saw a trial for brigandage in Sicily. (I think it must have been at Girgenti in 1885, but am not quite sure.) This band of brigands never made mistakes. They never tried to rob a man unless he happened to be carrying a good amount of money: they never held a man to ransom unless he was worth ransoming; and they never fixed his ransom at a higher sum than his people could just manage to pay. They evidently had good information; and there were comparatively few people from whom the various bits of information could have come. And now the police had not only got the band of brigands, but had got the members of the syndicate that ran the band. I saw the prisoners in court--they were all inside a great big iron cage like one of the aviaries at the Zoo--and I have never seen more respectable and pious looking people than some of the members of that syndicate.

There was a story going round Sicily then of some young scamp, who was hard up, and arranged with brigands to capture him and share the ransom that his parents were quite sure to pay. The parents paid up heavily, and the brigands kept their word and gave him half.

I was at Taormina in 1883--it was a quiet place then with only two small inns, not a suburb of hotels, as now--and I was reading in Goethe’s diary of his travels, 7 May 1787, how he sat there in a garden by the sea and planned _Nausikaa_, a five-act tragedy of which he wrote no more than sixty lines. I am only a _Wahrheit_ man myself, and have no _Dichtung_ in me: yet I have imagined Nausicaa in Corfu, when looking at the stone Phæacian ship there; and I have also imagined Ulysses in Sicily, when looking at the seven great rocks the Cyclops hurled at him at Aci; but Taormina brought me down to 735 B.C., with the first Greek colony in Sicily on the little headland there, and all that this portended for Carthage and for Rome. Being a real poet, Goethe only talks geology about the rocks at Aci, and rather regrets he did not picnic there and hammer off some specimens of zeolite. He says the Taormina scenery will provide him with a setting for his play: he will model Ulysses on himself, his own conversation being quite as entertaining and instructive as anything Ulysses can have said to the Phæacians; and he will model Nausicaa on the ladies he left broken-hearted at each place where he stayed.

A poet ought not to disclose the sources of his inspiration. One day Petrarch was thinking of Laura till his eyes were filled with tears, and he walked into a brook he did not see: hence _Del mar Tirreno_. And one day Toplady got underneath a rock and kept dry in a storm: hence _Rock of Ages_. Toplady was here the wiser man, and the better poet too, for he says nothing of the rain, whereas Petrarch talks of his wet feet.

Goethe has disclosed his sources here; and his setting for the play seems just as inappropriate as his heroine and hero. The ancients were convinced that Corfu was Phæacia, and there is a certain austerity about Corfu that exactly suits the theme; whereas Taormina is all riotous luxuriance, befitting a Cyclops or a Satyr, but not Nausicaa. And surely Ulysses and Nausicaa are worlds away from Goethe and the ladies who adored him. Croce has called him ‘gran poeta’ and ‘borghese’ also, that is, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle-class’; and I think it hits him off.

Tradition has made Homer old and blind, and knows nothing of his maturity or youth. And from this I gather that he made his reputation late in life; and I suspect he made it with his later work, the _Odyssey_, or rather with the striking part of it, the travels of Ulysses, v. 1-xiii. 184. I fancy that Ulysses was to Homer what Hajji Baba was to Morier--a character of whom he could narrate all manner of tales collected from all sources; and his tales of Southern Italy and Sicily were just the tales to take the fancy of the Greeks, when they first thought of planting colonies there.

For my own part I believe that he lived on until about 800 B.C.--as Herodotos avers, ii. 53--and that he heard the first explorers’ tales of all the places that Ulysses visits. I do not underrate the difficulties of this, and have read some cubic feet of books about them; but, where the critics trace the handiwork of different poets, I cannot see anything but Homer at different stages of his life. He must have reached a good old age; and an author’s point of view may shift a long way with advancing years. In the Vatican Library they show you Henry the Eighth’s treatise against Martin Luther with the author’s dedication to the Pope.

There is an amusing little volcano near Girgenti, and I once spent the best part of a day there playing with it, 26 March 1885. It is called the Maccaluba, which clearly is the Arabic _maklûbah_, ‘topsy-turvy,’ so that the name goes back to the days of Arab rule in Sicily. The mound is about 150 feet high, and on it there are little cones that shoot out gas and mud. You throw turf and stones into the mouth of a cone until you stop it up: then it wheezes and gurgles for a while, and finally shoots out the things you have put in; and you retire briskly, as the mud is scorching if it catches you. But the whole volcano was very quiet then, and seemed more bored than angry in the way it shot things out.

Apart from its great cone, Etna has always given me the notion of a big Bath Bun, the little cones being the lollipops. It covers more than four hundred square miles--twice the whole extent of Dartmoor--and it is only two miles high. It looks best at long distances, where the lower part is hidden and the cone stands out: the best view I ever had of it, was from a steamer going from Brindisi to Malta. With little more than a third of the height, Vesuvius made more show. But it is sad to see Vesuvius now, after the eruption of 1906: the cone fell in, and that has deprived the mountain of its former grace. Volcanoes have these ups and downs. I always wish I could have seen the rise of Monte Nuovo on the other side of the bay. It is 450 feet in height, and rose up from level ground in the course of a few hours.

We have an extinct volcano here, only half a mile from this house. One sees geologists going round there now and then with their little bags and hammers and going off with specimens. An eminent geologist came lecturing here in 1906, and he spoke of volcanoes breaking out again after long periods of calm, such outbreaks being usually most violent. One of the listeners was much disturbed at hearing this, and thought it hardly worth his while to go on putting in potatoes near such a dangerous place. So he inquired when that hillock were a-likely to be bustin’ forth. With the spaciousness of a true geologist, the lecturer replied, “In the science of geology a period of thirty thousand years is relatively....” The man went on with his potatoes.

Though living on the edge of a volcano, I do not worry about eruptions, but only about earthquakes. I can remember two earthquakes in England--I felt the shock in 1884 but slept through it in 1868--and I have seen what earthquakes do abroad (especially at Chios in 1881) and I do not want a heavy earthquake here. In these valleys it would be overwhelming. The hillsides are strewn with granite rocks that have weathered away till they have nearly lost their hold upon the ground--some actually are Logans and go seesaw--and a smart shock would send them racing down into the valleys below. Sometimes I see a rabbit start a stone off down a hill; and, when the stone comes bouncing by, I picture what would happen if the stone weighed ten or fifteen tons, and hundreds of such stones were coming like an avalanche.

A year or two ago the End of the World became a common topic of conversation, as a newspaper was exploiting some prediction of it. And a man here cleared the matter up with the remark--“In church it be World With_out_ End.” About fifty years ago my brother and I used to go to the Scotch Church in Crown Court towards the end of December, to hear Dr Cumming announce the End of the World for the ensuing year. But after a few years he grew more wary, and he hedged--“And if the World does not indeed come to an End, something else very remarkable will certainly occur.” (I quote from memory, and may have got the words wrong, but they were to that effect.) About the same date I heard a preacher in a country church declaring that the World, “having now lasted for close upon six thousand years, cannot reasonably be expected to last much longer.”

Coming into Jerusalem by the Damascus gate, 14 March 1882, I noticed two unfamiliar objects standing out above the city walls against the evening sky. Upon inquiry I found that they were ventilating pipes. A family (American, I think) had taken a house there, as they thought the Day of Judgement was at hand, yet wished to have a sanitated home meanwhile. And other families had likewise taken houses at Jerusalem, the notion being that the Last Judgement was going to be held there and residents would get priority.